By Steve Haner

The best defense has always been a good offense.  With Virginia Democrats under some political pressure over their wind, solar and electric vehicle addictions (not enough pressure, in my opinion), Virginia’s environmental activists are counterattacking at Republicans who won’t drink their green Kool-Aid.

The Virginia League of Conservation Voters has announced a digital media buy aimed at nine Republican House members who voted against some of LCV’s favorite bills.  The claim is that Republican votes caused rate increases which enriched some unnamed big energy company.  Dominion Energy is unnamed in the ads, of course, because it gives more money to Democrats than it does Republicans in Virginia.  It has spent twice as much so far this cycle buying Democrat loyalty as Clean Virginia has, and that is saying something.  So Democrats have to tiptoe around Dominion this year, but that’s another story.

You can see the ads here and here.  In this old comms guy’s opinion, I’ve seen better. The longer one in particular is confusing, but they are both worthless unless somehow they get tied to the individual candidates and the election. Instead, the message in the tag line is “clean energy lowers prices.”  No, and it isn’t even that clean, but that’s also another story.

In explaining why it did this, LCV’s release on its website cited three specific 2025 bills, two of which passed and one of them vetoed.  Let us explore those bills in the order in which they listed them, and why someone might have voted against them.  None of them lower any prices at all. 

House Bill 2266, which was signed into law, is described by them as cutting “excessive interconnection costs …to make small clean energy projects more affordable and bring projects online faster.”  Well, no, but it directs the State Corporation Commission to work with the utilities on improving that process. That is not a bill that this observer targeted as obnoxious. I should have.

It didn’t cut the costs, but it rewrote the method for recouping those costs, in some versions hitting ratepayers.  The cost allocation method the bill imposed would be hard to explain if the bill had been dealing with data centers.  But I wouldn’t want to accuse the Democrats and green energy industry of having double standards (first they must have standards at all). 

Then another excellent reason appeared to vote against this bill. The final version also created a new tax deduction “for installing a qualifying upgrade required to interconnect a triggering project.”  How much will that bleed the treasury? There is no fiscal impact statement from the Department of Taxation, and the bill never went to the money committees for review.  The tax deduction was apparently added by Governor Glenn Youngkin and then approved at the Veto Session.  LCV ignores the tax benefit entirely.   

Next is an issue that has been discussed here before, House Bill 2346, setting up a Virtual Power Plant.  The bill sets up a pilot program, just for Dominion, and as mentioned before the problem is summed up in this one sentence: 

The electric utility shall not own the electric school buses as a part of its proposed program, but such electric utility may own the related storage batteries. The electric utility shall only use the bus storage batteries to access the stored electricity at times when the participating school system determines that the electric school buses are not needed to transport students.

Oh yeah, Dominion installing 5,000 lithium batteries in Virginia school buses is not going to show up on our power bills, not at all!  Especially when there will be so many days a year when Dominion cannot tap them because they are delivering students instead.  That was a brilliant idea for lowering our rates. Their overall VPP proposal when it shows up will probably have other equally expensive provisions to subsidize batteries it can tap into or pay people to sign up.  

And finally, we find on their list House Bill 1935, one which Youngkin did veto.  Now why would anybody oppose a little ‘ol bill that just directs state agencies to work nicely together?  Here is the money sentence in the summary, and I do mean money, emphasis added:   

The bill specifies that such report shall include policy recommendations and a plan to ensure that weatherization-ready repairs and whole-home energy efficiency retrofits are provided to all eligible income-qualified individuals and households in the Commonwealth residing in multifamily buildings, single-family dwellings, and manufactured homes by December 31, 2033. 

Did I mention the expense of 5,000 EV batteries large enough to run school buses?  The rent-seeking dreamers behind this bill have their eye on the contracts to upgrade and fill with new appliances hundreds of thousands of dwelling units, owned and rented, by 2033.  Such a plan cannot be afforded, the goal cannot be achieved, so don’t waste state money writing such a plan in the first place. 

So, Trojan Horse bills all three: A tax cut, an EV battery bonanza, and a renovation contractors wet dream.  The hard part is explaining the Republicans who voted yea, not those who voted nay.  All three bills might indeed enrich Dominion Energy, but even more enriched will or would have been the green energy industry entrepreneurs who fund organizations like the Virginia League of Conservation Voters.

The ads, of course, avoid all the details and fine print and just say “Clean Energy is Good!”  They then show a bunch of solar panels.  Rather than objecting to the ads, I applaud them, because the more voters focus on the issue the harder it is proving to continue to snow them.  There are large swaths of rural Virginia where a field of solar panels is not the image you want behind your candidate.  You won’t catch Abagail Spanberger making that visual mistake.  But next year she might sign that voted bill planning for massive home renovations.